Should You Learn Grammar? Weekly Round Up

We’re back for another edition of the Language bug weekly round up.

Seeing as I wrote two articles in the last week on learning grammar, I thought I would do a themed edition of the round up this week and post some interesting links about whether you should learn grammar or not. I’ve tried to pick articles that go through the different approaches. Some suggest learning grammar only intuitively, some teach you how to approach grammar without even questioning why you should do it.

Should You Learn Grammar: The Links

Benny is very much of the opinion that you should leave learning grammar until another day. He follows a ‘speak from day one’ approach so this isn’t a surprise. It’s an approach I couldn’t really imagine myself doing, (I’m not even sure how it works in practice,) but for the extroverted amongst you and the people who love to jump in at the deep end, his approach is probably great. As such, his article on grammar will probably apply to you.

Lingholic has a similar view to Benny from Fluentin3Months. Learn grammar later. I’ve linked it because it’s a useful article, and if you’ve already read Benny’s article, then you can scroll down to the ‘Top-Down’ section of Lingholic’s article.

This is where he describes his sort-of-learn-grammar approach. I don’t really agree with his conclusion, unfortunately. I think it’s very much a case of over-generalising to say, “top language learners don’t learn grammar,” especially when most language learners do learn grammar: Whilst language learning as a hobby has evolved to some extent, most foreign language learners are doing it for business or educational reasons, and they all learn via traditional methods. Most students of EF speak English far better than a language learner speaks their target language, so it’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that people who concentrate on grammar aren’t as good as people who don’t.

If you agree with my assessement above, you might like this omniglot link. It’s not an opinion piece in a “Should you learn grammar” sense, instead it’s more a “This is grammar, this is how you learn it” article. It has a few things for you to be aware of when setting up your grammar learning program.

This site is a mixture of the two. It’s basic premise is good grammar learning is inductive, from real life, and bad grammar is learned from books. It gives some helpful hints along the way.

Should you Learn Grammar? Reading List Conclusion

That concludes the list for this week. Drop a comment for your favourite links on grammar learning (or anything else.) Or give us your thoughts and opinions on either the links or commentary, whether you agree or disagree. Where do you live on the “Should you learn grammar?” spectrum?